How Michelle Obama and Corporate HR Turned Wall Street Into Woke Street

Long ago in a city far away there was a human resources executive who began telling organizations that, to be simpatico with the culture, they needed to heed radical theories such as critical race theory gender fluidity, white privilege, cultural appropriation and 1984-style socialism in their organizations.

Okay, it was 1996, and the city was Chicago. The Associate Dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago was a woman named Michelle Obama. Yes, that Michelle Obama. The future FLOTUS was a hot commodity, brimming with resentments despite her position at the top of the food chain. She was a product of Chicago’s leftwing community spearheaded by former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayres. She regularly attended a church where the pastor hissed, “God damn America”.

Then she went to the University of Chicago Hospitals where, for the lofty salary of $273,610, she performed the same purgative act, inserting racial guilt and gender fluidity into their operations. By the time she left Chicago for the White House, the organizations she advised were in turmoil over white supremacy, slavery, sexism, colonialism and just about any product of the contemporary society. By all accounts her message was a raging success— for her.

Harsh? Here’s how she described the nation that gave her every opportunity at the time America voted for a black man as president. “For the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” FLOTUS captured the essence of the new radical dialectic, says Chris Rufo. “Abandoning Marx's economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.”

Michelle was hardly unique in pursuing this goal in the Human Resources setting. Across the corporate landscape thousands of like-minded Neo Marxist academics and agitators from the diversity class were burrowing inside the corporate structure to make white society atone for its “privilege”. Corporations wanted these well-paid revolutionaries  to tell them how to reach minority communities. These businesses purchased a full dose of resentment politics in the process. 

The eight years in which Obama and her husband ran America were a great time for the embedded HR consultant class (and the useful idiots of the fashionable left). Paid handsomely, protected by Obama administration hacks from criticism, they flourished in getting corporations to abandon market value and adopt social value as their governing principle.

They invented concepts such as safe spaces and hate speech to weaponize their message. They flooded left-wing media (but I repeat myself) with chic new names and faces to carry the message. They turned small-time criminals into soaring national figures. They convinced advertisers that a commercial without a blue-check message was corrupt.

At first it wasn’t obvious to the public just how radically the corporate side was about to change. As we wrote in July 2020  while America roiled in racial and social turmoil in the 1960s the corporate side never bought into Flower Power. Hollywood and academe might have swooned, but Wall Street was unmoved. 

But for this go-round corporate America is now a captive of their HR departments. A perfect example of how quickly the sensitivity apostles gained control of decision making can be seen in the Colin Kaepernick episode. When the 49ers QB took a knee during the national anthem he was roundly criticized by Obama’s successor in the WH, Donald Trump, and public opinion. It seemed Kaepernick had buried himself.

But then NIKE came to Kaepernick’s defence, making him rich, not for not playing football, but for playing footsie with the HR imperatives of their corporation. Incendiary writers such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo told other corporations that racial guilt, reparations, trans rights and more were as much their product as the running shoes (and slavish Chinese obeisance) was NIKE’s output.

Many corporations followed NIKE’s lead, making shareholder value subordinate to “human values”. Soon, we learned that these corporations and government bureaus were subjecting their white employees to radical seminars on white privilege, gender insensitivity and the evils of market capitalism. The goal was not to build a better company but one that bends to fashionable academic twaddle.

According to Rufo,  Lockheed Martin employees are now segregated at engagement sessions “Participants were asked to repeat and internalize 50 ‘white privilege statements,’ including: ‘My culture teaches me to minimize the perspectives and powers of people of other races’; ‘I can commit acts of terrorism, violence or crime and not have it attributed to my race.

“Participants then repeated and internalized 59 ‘male privilege statements,’ including: ‘My earning potential is 15-33% higher than a woman’s’; ‘My reproductive organs are not seen as the property of other men, the government, and/or even strangers because of my gender.’”

And so on across the Fortune 500. Anyone balking was roughed up by the social media handmaidens of change. The result is the complete capitulation of the business class, which once thought it could handle the radicals. Now, as we’ve seen in previous revolutionary takeovers in Germany, Russia and elsewhere, the corporate class has simply hunched its shoulders, mouthed the platitudes and hoped, in Churchill’s words, that the crocodile eats them last. 

Still, segments of society try to convince themselves that this will blow over, that it violates both the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964— and a friendly judge will right the wrongs. Just as Trump followed Obama someone friendly to business will succeed Joe Biden or Justin Trudeau. Wait till the midterms. 

Fat chance. Michelle Obama led the HR takeover of corporate America, and no CEO is now willing to oppose that tide. Enjoy your guilt.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx